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    Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan review – a lacerating exposé

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    “Ask not,” said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, “what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied.As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed. His wife, Jackie, whom he infected with a smattering of venereal ailments, lamented that his assassination deprived her of the chance to vent her rage at him. Nevertheless, she embraced his naked body before it was placed in a casket at the Dallas hospital, bestowing a final, perhaps frosty kiss on his penis.JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich. Not to be outdone, JFK shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother Bobby, his attorney general. Appointed ambassador to the UK in 1938, Joe declared democracy to be defunct and hailed Hitler’s new world order. He particularly admired Nazi eugenics, which weeded out human specimens he found “disgusting”, and he applied the sanitary theory to his own family. His daughter Rosemary seemed emotionally volatile and looked too chubby to appear in press photographs; deeming her a “defective product”, he had her lobotomised, which left her “functionally a two-year-old”. His wife was not consulted about the operation.View image in fullscreenA “negative life force”, Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls “technical sex”, short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death. During the showdown with Russia over Cuban missiles, JFK installed a nubile minion in his absent wife’s bedroom for amusement while he diced with “nuclear oblivion – a catastrophe of his own making”.The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr “dying was a high”, an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. “What a way to go,” he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized. In 1999, he bullied his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister into flying with him on a private plane he had not qualified to pilot; in bad weather he was baffled by the instrument panel, and all three died when the tiny Piper Saratoga spiralled into the ocean. The accident, in Callahan’s view, was “a murder-suicide”.View image in fullscreenAn angry sympathy for the women “broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead” by the Kennedys inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing. Her account of Rosemary’s unanaesthetised lobotomy left me reeling. It’s equally painful to read about the agony of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in Ted Kennedy’s overturned car at Chappaquiddick in 1969 while he wandered off to arrange for a fixer to finesse press accounts of the calamity: upside down, she contorted her body for hours to gasp at a dwindling pocket of air. Carolyn Bessette tormented herself to qualify as a blond Kennedy consort, enduring a makeover that left her scalp scorched by bleach. In case cosmetic scars seem trivial, Callahan adds a terse allusion to the state of Bessette’s corpse, severed at the waist by her seatbelt in the plane that John Jr so air-headedly crashed.After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, “just another New York woman on the go”. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called “lust demons” he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012.View image in fullscreenBut the longest shadow is cast by Ted, promoted as the family’s presidential heir apparent in 1980 even though he was “the runt of the litter, kicked out of Harvard for cheating” and a flush-faced alcoholic into the bargain. A psychiatric assessment quoted by Callahan discerns in sloppy, greedy Ted a “narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed”. Sound familiar? That diagnosis makes Trump an honorary Kennedy, with Boris Johnson as a kissing cousin. I sniffed a further connection when Callahan describes Ted arriving drunk at a royal dinner in Brussels with an equally plastered sex worker as his date; the pair appalled the company with their intimate antics, which at one point included urinating on an antique sofa. Could this episode have been reimagined in Christopher Steele’s debunked 2016 dossier where, without evidence, Trump is said to have watched sex workers in a Moscow hotel defile a bed in which the Obamas had slept by drenching it in a golden shower?Invented or not, such tales are fables about the pathology of politics. Forget the pretence of public service that these damaged men spout as they tout for votes. They seek electoral office because it licenses them to act out their fantasies – to randomly grab pussies or shoot passersby on Fifth Avenue with utter impunity. Having power over others makes up for their own quaking impotence, and all of us, not only those betrayed wives and disposable lovers, are their abused and casually obliterated victims. More

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      ‘They always got away with it’: new book reveals Kennedys’ shocking treatment of women

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      “The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it,” baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who blamed the political dynasty for the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, told his biographer. “They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”Death by air crash. Death by water. Death by suicide. These are just some of the fates of women who have associated with the Kennedys, as chronicled by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a book published on Tuesday that explores the “real Kennedy Curse” and reads like a grisly soap opera.Just as America’s founders have recently undergone a reckoning over race, Callahan argues that the family often treated as political royalty should face a reckoning over gender. In her account, misogyny runs through the Kennedys like a stick of rock with physical and psychological abuse spanning generations. And Camelot uses its power and wealth to ruthlessly control the narrative.Callahan writes: “When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving, in our new era, of such a memorial. Not one asked what kind of message his continued celebration sends to women and girls, now and in the future. Ask not, indeed.”Most topically, the book features John F Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently running as an independent candidate for president with a female running mate, Nicole Shanahan. It questions why he has been criticised for his anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and antisemitic statements “but not for his lifelong mistreatment of women”.Ask Not tells how Mary Richardson, a talented architect with looks evocative of Jackie Kennedy, married Robert in 1994 and had four children with him. She loved the idea of being a Kennedy but found her husband rarely present: his job did not require travel but he travelled all the time.“Gaslit. That’s how Mary felt,” Callahan writes. “The more pain she was in, the worse Bobby treated her. Some days he wanted a divorce; others, he wanted to bring another woman into their bed, an idea that left her humiliated. She rejected him outright.View image in fullscreen“One day Mary had a female friend over and Bobby sauntered in, right out of the shower, and dropped the towel around his waist, exposing himself. Mary had long suspected he was cheating on her, but he would always deny it. He’d tell her she was crazy, that she was the one destroying their marriage and driving him away. Was it any wonder he never wanted to be home?”Mary found Robert’s diaries. In the back pages were lists of women with whom Robert had had flings. The book elaborates: “He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. ‘My lust demons,’ he wrote, were his greatest failing.“He used the word ‘mugged’ a lot – women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.“There were so many – astronomical numbers, Mary said, and she knew a lot of them: The celebrated actress who came to their house and went on vacations with her family. The older model who was always around. The socialite whose husband was one of Bobby’s good friends. A gorgeous royal. The wife of a very famous man. A lawyer. A doctor. An environmental activist. All these beautiful, accomplished women. How could Mary compete?”Mary became distraught, weeping and drinking and struggling to get out of bed, the book says. Robert tried to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her that she would be “better off dead”. Callahan interviewed Mary’s therapist, Sheenah Hankin. When Robert asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused, telling him: “Your wife isn’t mentally ill. She is angry and depressed, but she is not ill.”Robert began dating the actor Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He cut off Mary’s credit card and access to cash. Broke, she had to ask other mothers for an extra $20 so she could buy petrol and groceries.Finally, she hanged herself at home. The book recounts: “Mary put on her yoga clothes and sandals, walked out to her barn, stacked three metal crates atop each other, then used a metal ladder to tie a hangman’s knot around the rafter. When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.”Mary’s siblings insisted that her depression had been a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, “bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her”.Robert, however, portrayed Mary to the world as a disconsolate alcoholic. In his eulogy, he took no responsibility for the anguish that his adultery had caused her. He said: “I know I did everything I could to help her.”Against her family’s wishes, Mary was buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts near Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of John F Kennedy. But, Callahan writes, “one week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away … Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone”.The title of Ask Not is a nod to the most celebrated line from John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” America’s 35th president is shown in an unflattering light as a philanderer who exploited his position to prey on young women.View image in fullscreenMimi Beardsley was 19 and working in the White House press office when John took her to a bedroom in the private residence, pushed her on to Jackie Kennedy’s bed and took her virginity. It was the first encounter of many, Callahan writes: “Mimi would be welcomed upstairs only when the First Lady was away, and it was her job to remind him of simple pleasures: small talk, shared bubble baths, and sex, hasty though it always was.”Callahan notes that, when Beardsley published a memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F Kennedy and Its Aftermath, it was pilloried by the media but became a New York Times No 1 bestseller. Robert Dallek, a Kennedy biographer, described Beardsley as “entirely credible” and told the Washington Post: “You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle anymore. This has become part of the public discourse.”John’s son, John Kennedy Jr, also features in the narrative as a serial risk-taker. With film star looks and charm, he was billed as the world’s most eligible bachelor. He began a relationship with Carolyn Bessette, director of publicity for Calvin Klein, but there were jarring ups and downs. “She was underweight and anxious all the time, using antidepressants and cocaine,” according to the book.Carolyn observed John Jr’s arrogance, thoughtlessness and reckless driving up close. “There was the time Carolyn and John got pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the car reeking with the smell of pot, a starstruck cop letting them go without even a warning.“‘There’s an unwritten rule in Massachusetts,’ John told her, ‘whereby members of my family can commit murder and mayhem’ – after all, decades earlier his uncle Ted had left a young woman to die in three feet of water – ‘and nobody bats an eye.’”Nevertheless, the couple married in 1996 after a rehearsal dinner where, the book recounts, Carolyn’s mother rose and made a stunning toast. “I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter,” she said. “I don’t know if John is right for her.”Three rocky years later, John Jr wanted Carolyn to accompany him to a family wedding on Cape Cod. Against her better judgment, she agreed to fly with him in the small plane he was still learning to pilot. “Carolyn said this to family members, friends, the waitress at their favorite restaurant in Martha’s Vineyard. She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot.”View image in fullscreenShe was tragically vindicated. John Jr did not file a flight plan and cut off all communication with air traffic control. An American Airlines flight had to divert to avoid a midair collision. John Jr kept climbing and could soon not tell up from down.“The plane went into a graveyard spiral, falling 900 feet per minute. Carolyn and [her 34-year-old sister] Lauren would have known they were going to die. The sheer force of gravity and speed would have been terrifying as they spun at 200 miles per hour, nose first, into the ocean.”Once again, Callahan writes, the myth-making Camelot machine ensured that, in the 25 years since the crash, Carolyn has been cast as a “drug-addled harridan who made the last days of America’s prince so miserable.“And, so goes the implication: if John Jr hadn’t been so miserable he wouldn’t have been so distracted, and if he hadn’t been so distracted he wouldn’t have crashed the plane. This has become conventional wisdom, accepted as fact, and it’s left Carolyn’s sister Lauren a footnote – still more collateral damage.”One of the family’s darkest chapters unfolded in 1969 when Senator Edward Kennedy accidentally drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, an island in Massachusetts. His car flipped upside down into a pond he swam to safety. His passenger, a 28-year-old aide named Mary Jo Kopechne, died inside the water-filled car. Kennedy did not seek help at the nearest house nor report the incident to authorities for 10 hours.“At the inquest,” Callahan notes, “John Farrar, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body the next afternoon, testified that Mary Jo had not drowned but had suffocated to death. He said she had been alive for at least an hour in the water, maybe longer.”Kopechne could have been saved. Yet, the author argues, that criminal act was successfully transformed into “Ted’s tragedy”, a terrible accident that unfairly denied him the presidency. He became revered as the “lion of the Senate” instead. She adds: “Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.”Drawing on archives, interviews with surviving family members and friends, and biographies, memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, Callahan details the stories of several more women whose lives were upended by the Kennedys. Some were involved in notorious affairs and scandals that made lurid headlines; others became tragedies that were marginalised and mostly forgotten.The New York-based author observes: “Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a viper, a seductress.“Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault. Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.”
      Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is out now More

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      Samuel Alito assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of respect for Roe, diary reveals

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      Samuel Alito assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of respect for Roe, diary revealsExcerpts reported by biographer show Alito, who wrote June ruling that outlawed abortion, said he was ‘big believer in precedents’ In a private meeting in 2005, Samuel Alito, who would become the US supreme court justice who wrote the ruling removing the federal right to abortion, assured Ted Kennedy of his respect for Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 court decision which made the procedure legal in the US.“I am a believer in precedents,” Alito said, according to diary excerpts reported by the Massachusetts senator’s biographer, John A Farrell, on Monday. “People would find I adhere to that.”Alito and Kennedy met regarding Alito’s nomination by George W Bush. The nominee also said: “I recognise there is a right to privacy. I think it’s settled.”Seventeen years later, in his ruling removing the right to abortion, via the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson, Alito said the entitlement had wrongly been held to be protected as part of the right to privacy.“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” he wrote this June.The late Kennedy, a younger brother of US president John F Kennedy, who spent 47 years in the Senate, also questioned Alito about a memo he wrote as a justice department clerk in 1985, outlining his opposition to Roe. Alito told Kennedy he had been trying to impress his bosses.“I was a younger person,” Alito said. “I’ve matured a lot.”According to Farrell, Alito told Kennedy his views on abortion were “personal” but said: “I’ve got constitutional responsibilities and those are going to be the determining views”.Alito was confirmed to the supreme court by the senate, 58 votes to 42. Kennedy voted no.Farrell reported the excerpts from Kennedy’s diary in the New York Times. A spokesperson for Alito “said he had no comment on the conversation”.Kennedy died in 2009, aged 77. His Senate seat was filled by a Republican, Scott Brown, who was subsequently defeated by Elizabeth Warren, who quickly emerged as a leading progressive. In June, after Alito’s ruling removed the right to abortion, Warren was a leading voice of liberal anger.“After decades of scheming,” she said, “Republican politicians have finally forced their unpopular agenda on the rest of America.”01:54Susan Collins, a Maine Republican but a supporter of abortion rights, said she had been misled in a meeting similar to that between Kennedy and Alito.Collins said that in the 2018 meeting, when asked about Roe, Brett Kavanaugh told her to “start with my record, my respect for precedent, my belief that it is rooted in the constitution and my commitment to the rule of law” and added: “I understand precedent and I understand the importance of overturning it.”In 2022, Kavanaugh sided with Alito and three other conservatives in removing the right to abortion.Collins said: “I feel misled.”Discussing Alito’s meeting with Kennedy, Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and legal ethics specialist, told the Times: “No serious court watcher can doubt that what Alito said in Dobbs he deeply believed in 2005. And long before then.”Farrell’s previous books include a biography of Richard Nixon. On Monday, reviewing Ted Kennedy: A Life, the Associated Press wrote: “Teddy lived long enough for his flaws to be fully exposed. All are laid bare in this book – the drinking, the infidelity, the selfishness, the casual cruelty, the emotional isolation.“The central riddle of Kennedy is how these weaknesses existed alongside the benevolence, loyalty, perseverance and wisdom that made him one of the most influential senators in modern American history.”The AP review noted Kennedy’s silence during another supreme court nomination, that of Clarence Thomas in 1991, writing: “When Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment, Kennedy was in no position to help lead the fight against him. He passed his time at the confirmation hearings by doodling sailboats, and Thomas was confirmed.”In June this year, Thomas joined with Alito to overturn Roe v Wade. In a concurring opinion, he suggested other privacy based rights could be next, including the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage.TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsEdward KennedynewsReuse this content More

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      'A similar challenge': how Joe Biden echoes Kennedys on US foreign policy

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      It was a popular Washington sport: find the past president who best explained Donald Trump. There was a touch of Andrew Jackson’s populism, a dash of Richard Nixon’s skulduggery, a sprinkling of Ronald Reagan’s myth-making. But now all that is over, who are the closest matches to Joe Biden?

      A huge portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hanging in the Oval Office makes the obvious connection between two men who inherited epochal crises and prescribed epochal remedies. But the room’s other contents suggest an affinity between the oldest man ever elected president and the youngest: John F Kennedy.
      Biden keeps a photo of himself meeting Pope Francis behind his desk, leaving no one in any doubt he is the second Catholic president. Kennedy was the first. Biden displays a bust of Robert F Kennedy, the 35th president’s brother and attorney general, beside the fireplace. The Oval Office also contains a 332g moon rock brought back by the Apollo missions, the posthumous realisation of Kennedy’s dream.
      So it was that in his first prime time TV address, last week, Biden pivoted from the coronavirus pandemic to exult in America landing a rover on Mars. He did not add that China, which last month put a spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, intends to put a rover on the surface too. A space race is under way between two global superpowers. Sound familiar?
      “It is very hard to exaggerate how much all of JFK’s beliefs and policies were shaped by the cold war,” argues Lawrence Haas, author of a new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire. “In the case of space, he was far less interested in the magic of space than he was in losing the space race to the Soviets.

      “He greatly feared the impact of Soviet advances on America’s competition with the Soviets for influence throughout the developing world. This was a time when countries and peoples across several continents were choosing sides: whether to be loyal to freedom and democracy and through that to the United States or communism and through that to the Soviet Union.
      “JFK obsessed over America’s image in the world. He took office when the United States was behind the Soviets in space and he agonised over it, certainly through 1961 and didn’t begin to relax about it until at least 1962 and then into 1963 when we were really making advances in the aftermath of his announcing the goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely to earth by the end of the decade.”
      In a 1962 memo to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who chaired the National Space Council, Kennedy asked if America had a chance of beating the Soviets. Haas adds: “Whether it was space or civil rights or a whole variety of other domestic issues, JFK crafted them through the prism of foreign policy in general and the cold war in particular.”
      ‘An alternative model of governance’
      Kennedy, a former senator, became president aged 43 at an inauguration featuring Robert Frost. Sixty years later to the day, Biden, a former senator, became president aged 78 at an inauguration featuring Amanda Gorman. Both poets sought to project optimism about the future but inherited a sense of American hegemony under existential threat. More